Posted on 03/17/2015 7:37:26 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Its a perpetual lament: The purity of the English language is under assault. These days we are told that our ever-texting teenagers cant express themselves in grammatical sentences. The media delight in publicizing ostensibly incorrect usage. A few weeks ago, pundits and columnists lauded a Wikipedia editor in San Jose, Calif., who had rooted out and changed no fewer than 47,000 instances where contributors to the online encyclopedia had written comprised of rather than composed of. Does anyone doubt that our mother tongue is in deep decline?
Well, for one, I do. It is well past time to consign grammar pedantry to the history books.
As children, we all have the instinct to acquire a set of rules and to apply them. Any toddler is already a grammatical genius. Without conscious effort, we combine words into sentences according to a particular structure, with subjects, objects, verbs, adjectives and so on. We know that a certain practice is a rule of grammar because its how we see and hear people use the language.
Thats how scholarly linguists work. Instead of having some rule book of what is correct usage, they examine the evidence of how native and fluent nonnative speakers do in fact use the language. Whatever is in general use in a language (not any use, but general use) is for that reason grammatically correct.
The grammatical rules invoked by pedants arent real rules of grammar at all. They are, at best, just stylistic conventions: An example would be the use of a double negative (I cant get no satisfaction). It makes complete grammatical sense, as an intensifier. Its just a convention that we dont use double negatives of that form in Standard English.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Irregardless of this writers opinion, unproper usage literally makes my head explode.
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Kinda like not using the proper word “regardless”?
The ‘ir’ means not, like irresponsible. So, irregardLESS means something IS regarded. The writer’s opinion in your post is held in regard.
Our American-English language is really a chore to fathom. lol
if you can’t be understood, your point doesn’t matter.
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True. ........Good to see your post, as I haven’t seen one recently. Hope you are doing well. I emailed Dolly about you a couple of weeks ago, but received no reply and email didn’t kick back. So??? Hope she’s alright.
Sorry, All, for the short highjack of this thread.
/johnny
Speaking proper English with conviction and full of truth is what will win the presidency in 2016. So far Ted Cruz does the best job, Scott Walker comes in a distant second (so far) and the rest are way behind.
Well perhaps. There are many dialects to Ebonics. While the ‘’high’’ dialect would be used thus ‘’He be’’ or Mofo be doin’’’.... other ‘’lower’’ forms drop the pronoun he/she and is thus ‘’be doin’. Also other forms of the phrase you point for example is the universal ‘’Know what I’m sayin’?’’. A more idiomatic expression, at least to my knowledge here in southern NJ is “Why you don’t be doin’ that?’’. As in “Why are you doing this?’’ Or ‘’Would you please stop doing that’’.
It does.
Maybe you missed the joke.
Since the liberal education establishment refuses to educate blacks they’ll just redefine what it means to be “educated”.
You don't teach "communicating" first. What you do first is lay down the fundamentals. Once children's language skills are developed, which happens as their other cognitive skills advance, they can begin to dialog.
The cart goes behind the horse, not in front of it.
Your advocacy is for a world of ignoramuses. You can enjoy living there, but serious people won't be living there with you and the rest of the cavemen. We've been there. We've evolved. Atavism is for liberals, and you're surrendering.
And, it was a non sequitur all 22 times.
There is NO one english language, there are many dialects.
Math is not communication, regardless of how much literallists want it.
To compare the two is to show why conservatives have such a terrible time communicating.
Your advocacy is for waiting for the ignorant to come up to your speed. They won't. There are too many dialects that you won't speak.
/johnny
This assertion is probably the best indication there is of your absolute confusion on the topic, and why it's probably pointless to attempt to communicate with anyone who understands so little.
Mathematics is the most essential form of communication. It is -- provably -- the only language in which self-consistent and unambiguous truths can be communicated. It is the language of all real science, and communicates between those who speak it at levels far higher, far more abstractly, and far more quickly than anything that English can achieve.
We must agree to disagree, and I seriously doubt that you can even understand why. This is often the paradox: those capable of uttering nothing but grunts and profanities believe themselves to be "communicating" something raw and essential.
Nope. They aren't. Animals don't speak mathematics. [Some] humans do.
You demand ONE, and there is no ONE. Just your narrow understanding, and willingness to make the ignorant come to your level. Of course, you do that because teaching is hard work.
I've done fine, teaching illiterates to understand 1920s american standard dialect as show in magazines from that era.
Your absolutist, math based language crap is why conservatives are doing such a terrible job of teaching their positions, and why they matter.
This is not a new argument. Sam Clements made jokes about it, over 100 years ago.
You are massively ignorant on communications. You may be ok with math, because with math there can be only one. Not with languages.
/johnny
If you challenge people, they will respond. If you comfort them in their ignorance, they'll get stupider. And that is exactly what you're encouraging, and what is happening.
You, and many rigidists don't want to hear how difficult it really is. You want to sit on your hands and insist they come up to your level before they learn.
That's the progressive way of teaching that has been taught since Dewey. Wring your hands and complain, or make a difference. I don't see many conservatives actually making a difference.
If you aren't getting out your message, the message isn't always wrong, you aren't always wrong, and the intended ignorant audience isn't wrong, it's the way they have been taught.
Teach them.
You can't do that by insisting that you have to wait for them to come up to your level. That invites the ignorant sloth to expand and take over.
The argument over englishes has gone on for hundreds of years, and will.
/johnny
Me flunk English? That’s unpossible!
What language is this? ...
The evanescent subtense of the angle of contact, in all curves which at the point of contact have a finite curvature, is ultimately as the square of the subtense of the conterminous arc.
It looks and reads like english!
( This is LEMMA XI of Book I of Newton's Principia, in Motte's translation. )
Well, it’s like whoa.... thats you know how it feels like, I mean like really..................and so on.
Newton was a genius, but was himself rather backwards in mathematical language. We use Leibniz’s symbolism — and not Newton’s — for a reason.
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